Lincoln, Nebraska, November 1999: You can just see the old coot, stock-straight at the sink in his clapboard house, jutting out the chin, whipping up the lather in an Old Spice cup, splashing on the kind of aftershave that stings, and loving the sting. He smooths the silver hair, cinches the Windsor, checks the hall mirror to assure himself that he is dressed--dressed--before he presents himself to the world. Friend, I give you elegance on the prairie, in the person of a man pushing seventy.

A man, I should add, who is under attack.

For out in the hall there is his wife--in a track suit, on the telephone. To KFOR-1240 AM, where the coauthor of a little book on men's fashion (me, actually: Esquire's Things a Man Should Know About Style, $10.95 at bookstores everywhere) holds forth on the fine points of cowboy boots and alligator blazers and argyle, and this woman, she states her grievance. "My husband insists on getting dressed up for every little errand," she grouses. "He wears a tie to Wal-Mart! Why can't he wear sweats like everybody else?"

I can just see the poor woman stuffing the Crown Vic trunk full with the dry cleaning. And yet, I must venture, "Ma'am, you could have worse problems."

We speak of Mr. Lincoln, Nebraska, not because he is to be admired for holding fast to his notions of propriety, although he is. We examine him here and now because he is unwittingly symbolic of a uniquely American

style philosophy: He dresses as he dresses not because the world demands that he do so, as it once did--quite the contrary, what with his lovely bride assailing his sartorial dignity on AM radio--but because he wants to be stylish; because he knows who he is and he shall present himself that way, however formidable the attacks on his way of life. He won't be having the Man (or, in this case, the Woman) telling him what to do. And neither will the rest of us.

Much ink has been spilled--desperate ink, snobby ink, curmudgeonly ink--on the decline of style and standards among American men. Outraged traditionalists, stodgy haberdashers fearful for their livelihood, fashion mavens glimpsing their waning importance, they persist in wheezing, wheezing against the dying of the suit; well, begone! We are not here to gnash our teeth nor rend our tunics over the tired subject of Workday Casual, an experiment that was taken to extremes by many and that, as a result, is on the wane in some quarters (while waxing curiously among Boston attorneys, more on which later).

We are here to take this conversation a step further. We have searched the nation on your behalf, and we're here to say that American style lives. In fact, that American style not only lives, it flourishes, even if not everyone--people who watch The Man Show, for example--abides by it. That more men than ever understand quality and demand luxury, and are applying that knowledge even to informal apparel. That there's a new generation of high-tech fabrics that make everything from dinner jackets to T-shirts more comfortable. That the selfsame democratization of taste now permeating the design of everything from armchairs at Crate & Barrel to spatulas at Target has also struck the rag trade, most visibly via a handful of midpriced retailers spreading passable knockoffs of better-quality designs to the farthest hamlets. That some rules still hold sway--the better rules, mostly--and that many of the rules we've jettisoned got precisely what they deserved. That the American hegemony over world culture in language and media and amusement parks now holds true for dressing oneself, and that that's actually good news, sweatpants excepted.

American style is about freedom and unpretentiousness and tempered bravery. It's about dressing to get lucky and to get ahead and to feel like as much of an individual as you are. And in some ways, it always has been.

TIME WAS, THE AMERICAN man knew exactly what to wear. He was told, and in no uncertain terms. In some Manhattan office buildings in the forties and fifties, a man without a hat was shown the side entrance. "In my dad's generation, all the men wore the same gray suit," recalls Cincinnati-bred designer John Bartlett, whose men's wear plays off archetypal macho imagery, notably uniforms. "Nobody wanted to stand out; everybody blended into one gray blur." Which, of course, was the idea.

The kings of Hollywood built upon Euro traditions--they dressed well and they dressed up; they accessorized with hats and pocket squares, watch fobs, cigarette cases, and money clips. They were clean-shaven and spit-shined, their jackets brushed and pressed, their hair cropped short. Of course, they had a whole wardrobe department to help them do it, but at least the regular man had an ideal to which he could aspire; he had guidelines. He knew what was appropriate for the office, and for the opera, for tennis, for cocktails, and for riding, even if he was more likely to spend a Saturday bowling than steeplechasing. He wanted to be Cooper or Bogie, Grant or Sinatra. And he sort of was.

Of course, it's facile to argue that people dressed great then, that style is dead now, and that the Gap is to blame. American style has always been peculiarly, well, American, always bringing to bear a fundamental insistence on practicality and comfort and a rejection of puffery. One couldn't very well tame the West, blaze the frontier, and keep the world safe for democracy in a morning coat. When we look back from the beginning of the twenty-first century, the middle of the twentieth looks so regimented. In reality, even the icons of Hollywood (particularly the icons of Hollywood) were experimenting. They were shockingly informal compared with their European peers. Men's men from Hemingway to James Dean adopted the American military's cotton khakis and bomber jackets for knocking about. John F. Kennedy, nearly as famous as his wife for being a trendsetter, was photographed barefoot, wearing chinos and an open-collared shirt, as often as he was pictured dressed for work. Fred Astaire wore a necktie as a belt. Gene Kelly sported white socks with his suits to draw eyes to his feet. Even in those eras, American style was more playful, more comfortable than those from across the pond, where a pastime as rugged as hunting required a necktie.

Sure, there's something sad about the recent unfashionability of Fred Astaire--like formality. (Of course, there's something wonderful about the fact that nobody makes musicals anymore.) But Americans have thrown out many of the rules because many of the rules were arbitrary, elitist, impractical, effete--in short, un-American. Tailcoats? Even in a Merchant Ivory picture, nobody looks good in tails. Ascots? Wing collars? White gloves? Useless. Even fedoras, sleek and cool and insulatory though they are, mess up your hair. One could go on.

You see, getting dressed used to be an artifact of fear--people dressed correctly because they had no other choice. People who are stylish now are stylish because they like to be. People are smarter now, and they're freer now. Plus, their feet are less likely to hurt. They can also make ever more extravagant mistakes--they might wear floor-length chinchilla coats if they happen to be Sean Combs. Such is the cost of freedom. My fellows, my brothers: We must bear this cost.

DECEMBER 1999: At the VH1 Fashion Awards, before a houseful of fabuloscenti and an unsuspecting television audience of millions, someone inexplicably hands a microphone to Steven Seagal.

You know, the actor?

The ponytail--it persists. Worse, having affected Buddhism, Seagal insists on wearing a kimono-y-looking thingie in public--in this instance, a silky, brown, embroidered one. Later in the interminable proceedings, Saturday Night Live's Chris Kattan (in character as the androgynous performer Mango) takes the podium and asks just the question I wanted to ask.

"Steven Seagal?" Kattan keens. "What are you doing here?"

It came as some relief to learn that the erstwhile action guy was introducing the Foo Fighters, not receiving some fashion kudo. But even some of the actual nominees for best-dressed male celebrity are a bit confusing (Ben Affleck? Jim Carrey?) and raise a troubling question: To whom, exactly, in this day and age, is a man to turn for inspiration and instruction? Sean Connery? Pierce Brosnan? Their savoir faire is inseparable from their Bond roles and thus is a relic of the sixties. JFK Jr., he is gone, and though he was good-looking he also wore a beret. Mr. Blackwell of the famous lists, he suggests John Travolta, but Mr. Blackwell is a 173-year-old dressmaker. The people at Armani, they suggest Ricky Martin (Ricky Martin?), because he wears Armani. Leo? He and "the Posse," they're a T-shirt crowd. James Van Der Beek? Does Master Van Der Beek own a suit without attached footies?

What has happened here is that Hollywood has abdicated its taste-making responsibilities. It has let us down. Again. "Once somebody gets to Hollywood, either they never had any taste or their taste is sapped from them," says designer John Bartlett. "The taste level has gone out the window."

Today, the stylish aspirant finds himself awash in a conflicting sea of influence from which he must somehow limn the truth. MTV's TRL, fashion advertising, the growing-if-dimly-aware acceptance of gay culture (Will & Grace zebra-skin rug, yay or nay?), Bill Gates and his coterie of vengeful nerds, the flashy commercial ephemera of dot-com culture. This constant assault of images is more confusing than helpful.

The search, then, is for who, what, and where define us as practitioners of something you could call a coherent look, an American gestalt. We seek the center; we must become grounded in sense.

WE HEAD LEFT TO Portland, Oregon--a good town, a regular-guy American kind of town, in a region where the family-owned Mario's has set the style agenda since the seventies (and perhaps is best known for making over those Microsoft boys). This remains the kind of store with a philosophy--the very best kind of store--a belief system applied to its customers, who should be grateful.

If a guy is buying suits these days, says owner Mario Bisio, he is buying better suits, and fewer of them. "He wants something great because he's not wearing it as often," Bisio says. Since most often he is not buying suits, the Mario's man is gradually being weaned from pleated pants. (Like many American men, he erroneously believes that pleats disguise girth.) He is finding pleasure in high-tech fabrics, and not just cotton-and-Lycra-stretch blends but lusher materials like, say, waterproof cashmere--yeah, cashmere--employed by the luxury mill Loro Piana in a rain jacket. There are soft jackets, knits, polos, and merino sweaters (still). "Then there's this whole weekend thing," Bisio enthuses. "A great plain-front pair of pants and a T-shirt and a high-V sweater and a leather jacket and a cool pair of tennis shoes. I mean, that's a real American kind of look, and it's definitely coming back."

We check in with Chicago--perhaps the ultimate regular-guy kind of American town, only the regular guys are, well, big. Like Joe Silverberg, who, with his brother, Gene, built the Bigsby & Kruthers chain of men's stores. For the Silverbergs, relaxing their stance on the business suit has been slow going. "Let's face it," says Joe, a man whose shape is more akin to a barrel than a V, "if someone my size goes to the office dressed casually and my stomach is hanging out over my pants, I'm halfway to looking like a shlump. Put a blazer on me and I'm gonna look a thousand times better."

But this doesn't mean you're without options. "It's a sophisticated, casual type of sportswear as well as suits. We'll have customers come in and say, 'Look, I don't care what he's wearing, if my partner's gonna have a wrinkled pair of khakis on and a pilled polo and a sweater and scuffed Top-Siders, the way he's gonna wash his car on a Saturday morning, I wanna look ten times better than he does.' " Joe's prescription: light wool trousers or something with some stretch, as comfortable as khakis but tailored. Something cashmere on top, and don't forget the blazer.

Still, some self-serving but heartfelt information that Joe wishes to impart: One day not long ago, Bigsby's invited a group of women to view a fashion show featuring ten men. "First we did sportswear, and then we did suits, and we had women tell us which looked sexy. And every single woman said the men that were dressed in suits."

Finalmente, we turn to New York, where Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys, sees in American men a conflicting desire--on the one hand to look sharp and on the other to dress for that which needs to be done--and he finds that the latter impulse wins. "If you look around London, a window cleaner, a taxi driver, everybody is starting to look a little groovy in a designer way, and I'm getting a little tired of that," Doonan says. "In the States, it's an earnestness, a less phony look, maybe a Hickey-Freeman look, to dress in a way that might open up the possibility of a promotion rather than someone dressing so self-consciously."

In the gleaming salons of Barneys one afternoon, Doonan spies an exceedingly good-looking man in his twenties trying on conservative suits. The lad is clearly moneyed, aggressive, and hip, and Doonan suggests that he might like to try something in a nattier side vent.

Replies the man, "I work in a law firm. Only the partners wear side-vented suits. Guys on my level wear center-vented."

"There are rituals that are still intact," Doonan trills, "the glue that holds people's lives together." And where would we be without at least some of them?

We are here to suggest that it requires a certain savvy and confidence to assess the world and to know that the time is right to wear what truly needs to be worn, what truly suits the occasion, and this sophistication, this self-knowledge and the will to express it, this is exactly what the casualization of America represents. Remember the attorneys of Boston, which has become something of a high-tech town? Nearly every firm in Beantown has dropped its dress code, finding that formality creates a barrier between its associates and their Netrepreneurial clients. Of course, most of the counselors keep a pressed two-piece hanging behind the door just in case.

American style is wearing what needs to be worn to get the job done best, and nothing else--unless dressing up simply happens to please you. "I think we're at a stage where everybody wants to enjoy the freedom of not wearing the suit because the suit was imposed," says Djordje Stefanovic, Ermenegildo Zegna's fashion director. "And when we get beyond that point, we'll come back to wearing the suit as a personal choice." And he may well be right. Early reports from next fall's fashion shows indicate a renewed embrace of the business two-piece.

A FINE SATURDAY MORNING. Stefan-ovic, the young man who is most responsible for one of the premier lines in men's wear, is not in the mood to dress up. He is wearing jeans, sneakers, and a polo. He has elected to not shave. "I'm kind of becoming American," he confesses.

He decides to visit the store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and finds it very busy, so he pitches in to help--and sells a whole wardrobe, complete with morning coat, to a guy who just wanted a suit. "I looked at myself and thought I wouldn't have been trustworthy," Stefanovic says, "but the guy was totally convinced."

Had he planned to sell rags that day, surely, Stefanovic would not have gone forth into the world looking any less than perfect. "It is not something I would recommend," Stefanovic cautions of his experiment with slovenliness. But from it, he gleans this lesson in the American can-do ethos: "In an emergency, don't step away. Try." Which goes to show you, one supposes, that American style is about more than just the clothes.

Of course, our friend Mr. Nebraska, he's not going to buy so much as a handkerchief (let alone a morning coat) from a guy wearing jeans, and more power to him. It is, after all, a free country.